Chancellor's Parashah Commentary

Judaism shuns the celebration of military victory. The conquest of
Canaan by Joshua was never transmuted into a holy day. Passover
commemorates our redemption from Egypt; Shavuot, the giving of the Torah
at Sinai; Tisha B'Av, the destruction of the Temples; but the demolition
of Jericho by Joshua or the final achievement of sovereignty with the
erection of the national shrine at Shiloh (Joshua 18:1) find no place in
the religious calendar of Judaism.

Nor is Hanukkah, a post-biblical festival, an exception to this
pattern. It is not the military prowess of Judah Maccabee and his
brothers or the territorial expansion under the Hasmonean dynasty which
our liturgical texts perpetuate, but rather the memory of Mattathias,
the priestly father of the family and instigator of the rebellion, and
the ensuing religious persecution and eventual cleansing of the Temple.
For the Talmud (B.T. Shabbat 21b), the miracle is not the expulsion of
the Syrians from Jerusalem, but a tiny flask of pure olive oil which
unaccountably burned for eight days at the rededication of the Temple.

As I said last week, the Rabbis, who gave Hanukkah its final religious
imprint, had come to doubt the benefit of taking up arms against the
Roman Empire, especially after three catastrophic failures. They did
not preserve the text of the First Book of Maccabees, which was written
originally in Hebrew rather than the Greek in which the text has
survived, and is a full and straightforward account, without theological
embellishment, of the ingenious Maccabean campaign against a vastly
superior military force. And they expunged both the feats and the
despotism of the Hasmonean kings that followed Simon, the last of
Judah's brothers, from Jewish collective memory. The historic irony was
probably not lost on the Rabbis: the Maccabees had risen to defend
Judaism against foreign contamination yet ended up being a major force
for its Hellenization.

Against this backdrop, we must also understand the haftora selected by
the Rabbis for Shabbat Hanukkah. Taken from the prophet Zechariah, who
lived in the late sixth century B.C.E., it urges the exiles who had but
shortly returned to Jerusalem from Babylonia to resume the construction
of a new Temple. Zechariah uses the menorah as an image of divine
favor, hence the link to Hanukkah. Deep faith will prevail over
material weakness. Resoundingly, the haftara culminates with the famous
line: "Not by might, nor by power but by My spirit, says the God of
heaven's hosts (4:6)."

However, I wish to argue that in the mind of the Rabbis there is more to
this prophetic reading for Hanukkah than merely a message of political
quiescence. Surely that is the overt meaning behind their choice, given
their accommodation to hard reality. But the Maccabean uprising also
introduced the value of religious martyrdom (as opposed to sovereignty
or religious freedom) which the Rabbis did make normative. The Second
Book of Maccabees, an abridgement of a larger work written in Greek in
the Diaspora, records two chilling instances in which Jews caught by the
Syrians prefer brutal execution to violating the commandments of their
God. The long history of religious martyrdom as the supreme act of
faith has its origins in this ancient book and the persecution that lies
behind it. The aged Eleazar and the unnamed sons of a single mother
became the prototype for both Jews and Christians. The Church
eventually canonized the seven brothers, calling them Maccabees, and
designated August 1 as the commemoration of their martyrdom. Preserving
and embellishing such acts of martyrdom prepared others to respond with
resolve when put to the test. Sounding this note, II Maccabees has
Eleazar declare after rejecting all Syrian advances: "By departing this
life courageously now, I shall show myself worthy of my old age, and to
young men I shall have left a noble example of how to die happily and
nobly in behalf of our revered and holy laws (6:27-28)."

While the Rabbis erased the memory of military victories associated with
the Maccabees, they often retold the martyrdom of the mother and her
seven sons, though shifting it to a Roman setting. In one version, the
narrative closes bitterly as the mother says to her sons: "Go and tell
your father Abraham: you put up one altar to sacrifice your son, but I
have put up seven (B.T. Gittin 57b)." As Jewish life deteriorated, the
Rabbis disseminated many similar tales of martyrdom to steel the faith
of their beleaguered flock.

Within this context, the haftara bears yet a second message more
relevant for Jews condemned to insecurity and degradation in a hostile
body politic. Deep faith has the power to transcend daily hostility, to
turn the Torah into a portable homeland and to render the pen mightier
than the sword. The words of Zechariah put a premium on mind over
matter, on will over fear, on transcendence over self.

And it is with this second message that Hanukkah can touch contemporary
American Jews who live in an unprecedented moment of collective security
and individual freedom. The call to spiritual nobility is a plea for
fidelity to an ancient legacy far greater than the self. It is an
affirmation of being over becoming, of ascribed status to achieved
status. It is a repudiation of our endless quest for novelty, of our
ceaseless efforts to redefine who we are, of our frenetic worship of the
self.

Nothing could be more alien to our current mindset than martyrdom. And
yet without a spiritual center of gravity, a core of ultimate values, an
attachment to something eternal, our lives flutter without purpose or
satisfaction.

It is no accident that the Rabbis speak of the study of Torah in the
imagery of martyrdom. "R. Simon the son of Lakish claimed that the
words of Torah spring to life only when one is prepared to kill oneself
over them, as it is said: 'This is the procedure [Torah]: When a person
dies in a tent [i.e. the tent of Torah]' (Numbers 19:14; B.T. Gittin
57b)."

The paradox is that unless we command an ideal for which we would be
willing to die, life is not worth living.